dozens of women-a hundred or more-with their heads shaved bare, bowed over poorly lit sewing machines that echoed off the steel walls into a deafening noise. The machinery was crowded tightly in rows, the scraps of discarded fabric like a patchwork-quilt carpet on the floor, the lone Asian guard patrolling the aisles with what appeared to be a stun stick in his hand. The size of the operation overwhelmed her, as did the dusty air and the putrid stink. She raised the camera to her eye and began to shoot, mesmerized by it all, determined to capture it, painfully aware that as her eye took to the camera she lost all peripheral sense of her surroundings. She moved behind that steel hatch door, using it as a shield so she couldn’t be seen from the hallway. It required both hands and a heavy pull to open it slightly farther in order to screen her from the stairway as well. She pushed herself more tightly into the far corner of the tiny landing, comfortable with her hiding spot and able to see and film the activities below.
This location gave her a momentary sense of protection, despite the fact that the catwalk balcony on which she stood allowed her to be seen from most anywhere on the floor. She reminded herself that she appeared as small to them as they appeared to her; and that if she remained perfectly still, it would take a good deal of concentration to pick her out up there. The recorder counted off its footage in time: thirty seconds. . forty. . fifty. . She didn’t need much. She could make her case by simply matching the images that Melissa had shot, for hers would look nearly identical, and the realization that she was standing in the exact spot where her little sister had stood before disappearing gave her a shudder of fear.
The camera’s LOW LIGHT warning troubled her. Sometimes a camcorder did fine in such light, despite the warning, but sometimes it recorded nothing but black. She could stop the recording, rewind and review her footage to make sure she had captured her proof. She was just about to do so when a bell rang out and all motion in the giant room stopped on cue.
Directly below her by some forty feet a man entered the room and spoke sharply in fluent Mandarin. ‘‘Stop your work! Line up!’’
The women obeyed like terrified soldiers, hurrying to form two long lines in a scuffling of bare feet and bowed heads. They stood at attention as the room’s lone guard moved from station to station, freeing the few women chained to their machines. What footage! Stevie’s eye remained glued to the camera. She panned from face to face hoping to see Melissa, excitement and anticipation pounding sharply in her chest. She wanted so desperately to confirm her among them.
‘‘We are leaving ship at once,’’ the man announced. ‘‘Groups of six. No more. No less. You will go orderly and quietly or you will get the stick,’’ he said, hoisting the cattle prod.
The women mumbled amongst themselves.
‘‘Silence!’’ this man roared. ‘‘Groups of six! Begin!’’
The first six shuffled out of the hold in fast little steps, as if practiced in boot camp.
Did they know someone had sneaked aboard? Had the sentry in the cabin cruiser raised the alarm? Or was this simply the plan, the reason for the semi truck?
Stevie heard the clap of quickened footsteps approaching from down the hallway behind her. Rodriguez’s thickly Hispanic voice, not twenty feet away and closing, spoke with a chilling authority. ‘‘Three of them charges go forward, two in the back. . We flood both them holds. Set the trip on the starboard door. You got that?
He stepped out onto the balcony not three feet away from her-so close she could have reached out and touched him-a huge man with wide shoulders and a sour smell. She cowered on the far side of the steel hatch as he leaned over the rail to watch the work progressing below. She knew that smell: It was the same man who had invaded her apartment. The temperature in the hold was in the low nineties. Stevie McNeal shuddered.
He said, ‘‘Only the starboard door. Make sure them others are sealed tight as a ten-year-old.’’ As he spoke, great gushes of water began to pour into the hold from all four corners. The cold seawater rushed toward the feet of the women who stood at attention without saying a word. That power cord she had followed was strung along the floor like a snake. Its electricity wouldn’t mix well with water.
Rodriguez said, ‘‘With them holds flooded she’ll go down fast. Our guy’ll be the first aboard when they get here-he’ll make certain it trips. Get ’em in that truck. Fast. Hurry!’’
‘‘The machines,’’ a guttural Asian voice objected. ‘‘What about the machines?’’ Hidden by the door, this man went unseen by her.
‘‘He said lose ’em,’’ Rodriguez replied. ‘‘It don’t look right otherwise. With the mud down there it’ll be a mess. We buy ourselves a day at least, maybe a week or more. That’s all that matters. He thunk it through, I’m telling ya. It’s sweet.’’
‘‘Expensive.’’
‘‘Not your worry. Not mine. His decision. He’ll live with it.’’
‘‘Maybe not,’’ that Oriental voice replied.
Rodriguez coughed out an uptight laugh. ‘‘You got that right.’’
He turned and ducked through the hatch. She heard their footsteps fade down the hallway. She exhaled and grabbed for air, soaked in sweat.
Huge conveyors hung suspended overhead and attached to the wall, apparently to lift the dead fish to the processing area where they would have been cleaned before being frozen while still out at sea. A metal wall ladder ran up to them. An enormous hatch half the size of a tennis court occupied the center of the ceiling-the deck hatch through which the catch was initially deposited. A catwalk ran alongside this hatch as well, maintenance access perhaps. She could make out only two other doors to the giant hold-steel hatches-both directly below her: one on the ground level through which the women now passed in groups of six, and another that suddenly swung open at the middle landing. Seawater continued to flood the chamber. With the hatches left open, the entire ship would flood.
She heard a sound below and looked down to see Rodriguez step out onto the middle balcony directly below her, again leaning his head over to inspect the progress. He was a man charged with a particular task, and she could feel his impatience to see it through. Standing alongside him was an Asian with hands the size of oven mitts.
The plan was a simple one, she thought: evacuate the illegals- protect the investment-and then later let Coughlie raid the ship himself, acting as an INS agent. If she had it right, Coughlie intended to scuttle the ship while he was aboard-another ploy intended to buy him both support and sympathy and to mislead any subsequent investigations.
She looked down at her right hand: All this time the camcorder had been recording. She hadn’t realized it, too caught up in Rodriguez’s proximity, but his voice had been recorded on tape as he issued his instructions. This camcorder had the man dead to rights.
But it was all worthless if she didn’t get to Boldt immediately. She had to move fast.
She stepped toward the hatch door, but in the process the strap to the camera case snagged behind her on a metal spur and tilted the case over, dumping its contents. Before she could react, a power cable, a blank tape and a spare battery spilled out noisily onto the steel landing, sounding like a drawer of kitchen utensils hitting the floor.
Stevie, who reached to catch the contents of the case a moment too late, found herself looking straight down through the slats under her feet and into the eyes of Rodriguez, directly below.
As the contents banged off the lower landing and rained down to the floor of the hold, every eye lifted up to look at her.
For a moment Stevie’s heart simply seemed to stop. She was the center of attention-the very place she had made the focus of her professional life-and she suddenly wanted anonymity. Everything, everyone, stood still. She couldn’t breathe; the pain was so great in her chest. Rodriguez, too, seemed frozen by the discovery of her. But then he moved to climb the stairs, taking them two at a time, and Stevie understood she was a dead woman.
The one thought that flashed before her was that Rodriguez controlled these women with fear. He and his men were grossly outnumbered. To disrupt that control-regardless of what happened to her and her tape-was all she had left. Rodriguez could offer them only fear; she had a far stronger weapon.
He had twenty or more feet to climb as Stevie stepped up to the rail and shouted in her best Mandarin. ‘‘Little Sisters! I am with the American press! The police are on their way! You are free!’’
For a thousandth of a second there was absolute silence. Rodriguez stopped his climb and looked down
